Are We At The Bottom Yet?
Most of my Buying clients and some Sellers seem to have, at least, this one thing in common.....wanting to know if we have "hit bottom" in the North Idaho area market. I have felt the inventory is diminishing and the number of Buyers are staying consistent, but thought I would turn those feelings into hard facts....and prove it to myself.
Once you "hit bottom" there is no place else to go but UP. Home prices are affected by many factors, but one sure thing is that when inventory falls and Buyers increase, this will eventually cause prices to rise....the old supply and demand thing takes over.
The graphs depicted here are populated with facts from the Selkirk Multiple Listing Service (MLS). In the blue and green graphs, I used a price range of homes from $125,000 to $3,000,000 in the Bonner County area only As you can see in the blue graph, inventory has significantly reduced from 2007 to 2010.
The green graph shows us that Buyers actually buying a home have stayed fairly consistent over the last three years. The brown graph shows us that the average price for a home has dropped from 2008 to 2010, but is stabilizing. The price range used for the brown graph was 0-3M, but when I eliminated homes below $125,000, the prices started to rise.
What does all this mean? With inventory diminishing, sold prices rising in some price ranges and interest rates inching their way up, it's easy to see that this may be the best year we will see in many years to come for making that property purchase.
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